Lucius Fabius Justus was a Roman senator active in the late 1st and
early 2nd centuries AD, who occupied a number of offices in the
imperial service. He also served as suffect consul in 102, replacing
Lucius Licinius Sura as the colleague of the consul who opened the
year, Lucius Julius Ursus Servianus; both Justus and Servianus closed
their nundinium at the end of April.
Justus is known as a correspondent of Pliny the Younger, and is the
addressee of Tacitus' Dialogus de oratoribus.
Ronald Syme posed the
question in a 1957 essay why did
TacitusTacitus address his work to Justus
instead of, for example, Pliny the Younger. Syme's answer was that
Justus at the time of the dedication was a young adult who had become
cynical of the craft of rhetoric. Syme further pictures Justus as a
viri militares (unlike Pliny), and pictures him as "an enlighted and
cultivated person [who] had deserted eloquence for the career of
provinces and armies" despite that there is little evidence for
Justus' role in governing provinces or leading armies.[1]
Origins[edit]
There is no exact information on the origins of Justus. Syme and
Werner Eck believe that he came from a senatorial family of Gallia
Narbonensis. However, other authorities cite epigraphic data that
Justus was from the Iberian Peninsula, pointing out that there are
more inscriptions that mention a person of the gens Fabius in those
provinces: where there are only 50 such inscriptions in Gallia
Narbonensis, there in the provinces of Hispania there are over 300
inscriptions.[2]
Historian A. Kaballos notes that a number of senators, bearing the
gentilicum "Fabius", originated from Spain.[2] As for which province
Justus came from, an inscription has been found in Lusitania
mentioning a Fabius Justus of the tribe Galeria.[3] According to the
researcher Francoise de Bosque-Plateau, our Justus came from the
Spanish city of Ulia.[4]
Life[edit]
From the correspondence Pliny published, he mentions Justus in one
letter and wrote two more to him. In a letter to Voconius Romanus,
wherein Pliny gloats over the discomfort the delator or informer
Marcus Aquilius Regulus felt following the death of
DomitianDomitian in the
year 96, Pliny mentions that Justus was one of the people Regulus
approached to intervene on his behalf with Pliny, hoping to stave off
Pliny's prosecution of the former informer.[5] Of the two letters he
wrote to Justus, the first was a light-hearted reproach for not
writing him, while the second apparently was written after Justus
responded to Pliny's first letter, accepting Justus' explanation that
during the present summer he was too busy and looking forward to the
winter months when Justus would have more time to write, while
promising to send some of his own writings which the other had
apparently asked for.[6] Syme writes he fails to detect in the two
letters addressed to Justus "a common friendship" with him that Pliny
had with Tacitus, another of his correspondents: "He stood closer to
TacitusTacitus than did the other consular orator. Pliny favoured Tacitus
with a long epistle defending long orations (I.20). Fabius has the
dedication of the Dialogus which declared that eloquence is not needed
any more."[7]
Evidence for his career begins after Justus completed his nundinium as
suffect consul. On the eve of Trajan's Dacian War, Justus was
appointed governor of
Moesia InferiorMoesia Inferior in 105, replacing Aulus
Caecilius Faustinus; he held this post after the conclusion of the
war, until 108.[8] Syme would date the two letters Pliny wrote him to
his administration of Moesia Inferior, thus explaining why Justus had
been too busy to write.[7] Once his term in
Moesia InferiorMoesia Inferior was
completed, Justus was assigned that same year to Syria, which he
governed for four years, until 112.[9] Syme speculates he may have
died in Syria, thus being denied a second consulship.[7]
References[edit]